Fila

From our home-stays and Outapi, we drove a few hours towards the ocean and into the land of the Himba. The Himba people are one of the oldest groups of humans and remain almost how they were over 900 years ago. Many of you may have seen pictures of these beautiful people covered in a red paste with braids of thick red clay. CGE had worked out a complex deal with a chief, for only the second time, that we could camp next to his village if we brought some food and supplies for his people. This resulted in us staying within throwing distance of an ancient community for 3 days. First and foremost the Himba are the most beautiful race of people I have ever seen. The women, bare-breasted, wear ornate belts and anklets according to how many children they have and the girls wear brighter colored beads around the chest and hair. The boys wear loin clothes and minimal coverings but the modern dress is beginning to creep in as many boys wear torn shirts and shorts. Each night we would light a fire and eat dinner beside it as the Himba children and women would appear out of the darkness only to sit down peacefully next to our fire. When we gave them food, the peace was quickly put on hault and it turned into a scene of aggression and fury. The boys were responsible for all of this chaos, while the girls sat quietly and politely and would even wait for the boys to arrive to eat their food. We communicated with each other through body language and our hands and taught each other words in our respective languages. I spent both nights sitting and talking with a beautiful and bright 12-year-old girl named Fila. We exchanged words for star and the moon and told each other of our families. Fila will remain one of the main figures in my memory of this semester and I apologize for not being able to elaborate on that further. The experience of sitting with this community by firelight was nothing short of surreal and in that sense very hard to describe. I took walks at night and early in the morning guided by the fires of the different families and realized that this thousand year old community will be gone, certainly in this form, before I turn 50 and most likely sooner. We discussed as a group if this modernization is an avoidable, negative, and necessary thing? We didn’t come to any conclusions, but how could we, and most importantly how could they?